Question

You may know that the city provides free meals in NYC because of the pandemic. Suppose one of those locations that gives free meals wants to make sure they have enough meals every day but do not have many leftover meals. So, they contact you to calculate the number of meals needed for that location every day (suppose that the daily demand has the same distribution with the same parameters).
How do you set up a plan to calculate the number of meals needed everyday? You should clearly explain the distribution you assume that the demand has, how you find the parameters of that distribution, and how you calculate the number of meals needed for that location. Explain all steps.

Answer 1

The plan for calculating the meals needed everyday is as follows:

Step 1: Define the problem

The city provides free meals in NYC because of Pandemic and city wants to know number of meals needed for the specific location by ensuring that there would be no leftovers.

Step 2: Define the variable (parameter of interest)

The variable is the number of meals per day

Step 3: The type of distribution

The data collected is supposed to follow normal distribution

Step 4: The confidence interval:

Since there must be no leftovers, we will assume that 99% confidence interval while calculating the number of meals.

Step 5: Margin of error and standard deviation

Since this will a practical analysis, the errors are bound to come due to various factors. We can consider that standard deviation should not be more than 5% of the average numbers of meals and margin of error should be not more than 10% of the standard deviation.

Note: These are assumptions and could vary from researcher to researcher

Step 6: Determining the number of meals.

Using the above data, following formula will be suitable to calculate the number of meals: